3 Leadership Lessons From A Naval Academy-Influenced Successful Start-Up

“Most humans want to be happy and free to enjoy friends” is not the kind of statement you might expect to hear from a typical company president. But Tim Duba did not set out to create and run a typical company. Duba is a veteran and graduate of the United States Naval Academy.

After leaving the military, Duba found himself working in operations, sales and marketing roles at several large corporations while moving around the country. As is the case with many people who work in large organizations, Duba’s corporate jobs left him unfulfilled. A lack of balance in his life led to a lack of excitement and purpose. Duba decided that when he was going to start a company, the culture would look and feel very different. He wanted a create a culture where people come first, and he wanted to create an environment that gave people the tools to flourish in life.

With a passion for outdoor pursuits, Duba envisioned a company that made products that provide consumers with simple solutions for optimized wellness. Duba reached out to two close friends: Andrew Powch, who’d been with Duba at the Naval Academy, and Mark Healey, a professional big-wave surfer. Together, the three co-founded Protekt, a company that produces supplements to support and enhance hydration, energy, rest, and immunity.

Since its founding in 2019, Protekt has grown considerably. Between 2022 to 2023, it gained 200% more new customers and grew sales by 350%. Duba shared, “Now, my job is focused on leadership. It’s about bringing great people to the brand and maintaining the company culture that will help us sustain our growth.” Protekt’s culture didn’t happen by accident. The founders were very intentional in their leadership actions. These actions can be applied in your business as well. They include:

1. Lead By Example
2. Identify Your Core Virtues
3. Create Constant Feedback Loops

Lead By Example

Albert Schweitzer once wrote, “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” Duba credits the Naval Academy for being the crucible that forged his ideas around leadership. Even the Naval Academy’s website shares, “Make no mistake: the four years at Annapolis are very challenging, tightly structured, and designed to push you well beyond your perceived limits.”

Duba recollected, “At the Naval Academy, there were quite a few people who would take us out for training in the morning and make life hell. However, at the same time, there was this handful of people who also took us out for training and pushed us to our limits, but they’d do it with us. I always respected that. These were the people who said ‘I’m not asking you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.’ That’s something that stuck with me my whole life, and it’s stuck with Andrew. The lesson I learned was to be the kind of leader that when times are tough, there’s no question in your employees’ minds that you’re working as hard as you possibly can too. I know that at Protekt, I have to wake up every day and set that example.”

Identify Your Core Virtues

Duba reflected, “The more that Andrew, Mark and I talked, the more we started talking about why good ideas fail in companies. It really boiled down to ego and a lack of transparent conversations.” Shortly after starting Protekt, Duba and Powch were introduced to Patrick Lencioni’s book The Ideal Team Player by a fellow entrepreneur and friend. In it, Lencioni spells out the three core virtues of effective team members: humble, hungry, and smart. These ideas stuck with Duba and Powch, and have become a key part of the Protekt cultural playbook.

Duba shared, “At Protekt, we hire for talent and train for skills. When we onboard folks, we look for entrepreneurial spirit. We have a very intense interview process. It takes a while. The candidate has to meet with everybody. We ask a lot of tough questions. While we want well rounded employees, at their core, they need to be humble, hungry and smart. If there’s one phrase that gets repeated more often than any other at Protekt, it’s that ‘Ego kills greatness.’”

Cultivating these key attributes of humble, hungry and smart means that learning is an integral part of the organizational culture. Duba shared, “One of the things we definitely got from the Naval Academy was a reading list. At Protekt, every employee is required to read a book once a month. We have a discussion group on the book, explore what ideas were learned, and share how they can be put into practice. Books can be on a variety of subjects, ranging from leadership to mental toughness to marketing, and the employees help choose what books we read.”

Create Constant Feedback Loops

It’s one thing to preach transparency. It’s another to live it. Protekt has tapped into the power of peer accountability. Duba shared, “When you tell the right people the truth it excites them. Within our small teams, we have a peer review system we go through every two quarters. It started it as an anonymous peer feedback, but, much to my delight, the employees preferred it to be not anonymous.

While we prescribe to the principles of humble, hungry and smart, we recognize that most people are deficient in one of those three areas. We try to call this out and bring this up. We want to help people identify what they need to do to become the best team player they can be.

Ideally, we want to help develop everyone. We empower people to do their job, but we’re still a lean start-up. The first 90 days is heavy with feedback loops on performance. We make employees aware that there is no backup for their role; that’s why they were hired. If an employee is not pulling their weight, their peers are going to notice it and let them know. Based on performance and peer reviews, we’ve had some employees who didn’t make it past the 90-day mark where it was clear that it wasn’t a good fit after feedback at the 30 and 60-day mark.

Candor is a key aspect of the Protekt culture. Duba shared, “At the Naval Academy, every aspect of our performance was judged: physical, mental, and emotional. Candor was how things were done.

At work, sometimes you have to say some really tough stuff to your coworkers. Talking these things out together makes the team stronger. I’ve been in companies where peers were afraid to speak up, and leaders were unwilling to hear what employees were saying.

There’s nothing that we don’t share with employees. We share our venture capital pitch decks, and feedback from board meetings. We tell the team, ‘They like this, they didn’t like that’. If our employees understand our goals, they can be more aligned with what we as leaders are looking for, and be more aligned with those that report to them. There’s no secret to it. I just don’t understand why more companies don’t operate this way.”

Poor leaders create culture by default. Great leaders create culture by design. If you adopt the behaviors of leading by example, identifying your core virtues, and creating constant feedback loops, you’ll have a good start to building a successful organization where your people can thrive.